The US right’s new reason for opposing action on climate change: it’s Marxist

Justice Scalia’s criticism of an attempt to curb pollution gives a taste of what’s to come

Karl Marx: Obamacare and climate change policy are among the initiatives branded ‘Marxist’ by US conservatives. Photograph: Henry Guttmann/Getty Images

Everywhere you look these days you see Marxism on the rise. Well, okay, maybe you don’t – but conservatives do.

If you so much as mention income inequality you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.”

In the right’s eyes sinister motives lurk everywhere – for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favour trains is their goal of “diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”.

So it goes without saying that Obamacare, based on ideas originally developed at the Heritage Foundation, is a Marxist scheme – why, requiring that people purchase insurance is practically the same as sending them to gulags.

Until now, the right’s climate craziness has mainly been focused on attacking the science. And it has been quite a spectacle. At this point almost all card-carrying conservatives endorse the view that climate change is a gigantic hoax, that thousands of research papers showing a warming planet – 97 per cent of the literature – are the product of a vast international conspiracy.

But as the Obama administration moves toward actually doing something based on that science, crazy climate economics will come into its own.

Power-plant pollutionYou can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent US supreme court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the EPA has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants which drifts across state lines. But Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested that the EPA’s proposed rule – which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost – reflected the Marxist concept of “from each according to his ability”. Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?

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And you can just imagine what will happen when the EPA, buoyed by the smog ruling, moves on to regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Tyrannical actWhat do I mean by crazy climate economics? First, we’ll see any effort to limit pollution denounced as a tyrannical act. Pollution wasn’t always a deeply partisan issue: economists in the George W Bush administration wrote paeans to “market-based” pollution controls, and in 2008 John McCain made proposals for cap-and-trade limits on greenhouse gases a part of his presidential campaign.

But when House Democrats actually passed a cap-and-trade bill in 2009, it was attacked as, you guessed it, Marxist.

And these days Republicans come out in force to oppose even the most obviously-needed regulations like the plan to reduce the pollution that’s killing Chesapeake Bay.

Second, we’ll see claims that any effort to limit emissions will have what Sen Marco Rubio is already calling “a devastating impact on our economy”.

Why is this crazy? Normally conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues – such as a cap on carbon emissions – those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.

Now, the rules the EPA is likely to impose won’t give the private sector as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economy-wide carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to blame: their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.

Furthermore, focusing climate policy on coal-fired power plants isn’t bad as a first step. Such plants aren’t the only source of greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re a large part of the problem.

First stepWhat about the argument that unilateral US action won’t work because China is the real problem? It’s true that we’re no longer number one in greenhouse gases but we’re still a strong number two. Furthermore, US action on climate is a necessary first step toward a broader international deal which will surely include sanctions on countries that don’t participate.

So the coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate – just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored.

Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.

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